Kathleen Boyd (English)

Sooja Kelsey

Sydney Fonteyn Lewis (English)

Jason Morse (English)

Jed Murr (English)

Christian Ravela (English)

Suzanne Schmidt (English)

Pacharee Sudhinaraset (English)

Simon Trujillo (English)

www.raceknowledgeproject.org

The Race/Knowledge Project is an interdisciplinary research project consisting of two interrelated lines of inquiry that explore the contemporary articulations and contradictions of race and culture within and beyond the university. The first line of inquiry investigates how, under neo-liberalism, the cultural predominance and interlocking discourses of multiculturalism and color-blindness are intimately tied to transformations of global capital. Understanding the university as a global institution, the project situates the university as the principle object of inquiry to register the ways in which multiculturalism, color-blindness, and global capital reinforce, mediate, and circulate racial meanings. Yet, these discourses do not exhaust the trafficking of racial meanings. Thus, the project also explores the global university as an analytic to index other conjoining discourses. In this way, it will problematize both the university as a coherent site of knowledge production and the dominance of multiculturalism and colorblindness as sufficient discourses for comprehending the historical codification of contemporary racial meanings.

Accordingly, our second line of investigation queries how to understand and perform “anti-racist praxis” in light of the multi-level and shifting domain of the global university and the correlative dominance of colorblindness and multiculturalism. These conditions present particular sets of problems for conceiving of race/racism. Thus, it necessarily forwards a conception of race, contra essentialized notions, that recognizes its multiple contemporary meanings and unevenly articulated histories to be intricately connected to and inseparable from other social formations such as sexuality, gender, class, age, and/or ability. In this sense, the project will examine how the multiple valences of race are profoundly imbricated in the dynamics of the global university and therefore, requires the exploration of an “anti-racist praxis” that exceed both its traditional disciplinary boundaries and its traditional domain in the university.

This project will be a one-day symposium of panels, presentations, workshops and performances seeking to foster collaborations between variously located scholars, activists, teachers, and cultural workers. This event will encourage alternative ways of engaging race, racism, and anti-racist praxis within and beyond the geographical and epistemological boundaries of the University. As such, we will put out a "Call For Participants" asking for workshops, performances, roundtable dialogues as well as paper submissions that cross disciplinary boundaries and that emphasize a commitment to engaging cultural politics. We envision this symposium as one that encourages multiple ways of thinking about “anti-racist praxis.” Participants will range from nationally-recognized academic scholars to local and lesser-known public artist intellectuals, thus creating a space that bridges academic and public knowledge production, arts and activism, collaborative and instructional methods of engaging with questions of race, representation and culture. Our Spring Symposium will begin with a morning plenary to frame the symposium, followed by paper presentations/panels, a break for lunch, afternoon workshops, a presentation by the keynote speaker, and will end with a performance